Students celebrating my 50th birthday with an impromptu, progressive dinner block party in Malmö, Sweden. It was that kind of special group!

The 2019 study abroad course has come to an end, but the work of the class will not end.  Throughout this 3.5 week course in which we met with many local professionals and experienced the freedom and joy that comes within cities designed such that the bicycle is the most convenient transportation tool, students always ask me if they were the best group of the five study abroad courses I’ve led.  Of course that is like asking a parent to choose their favorite child.  But let me be clear – this was an unbelievably fantastic group of 17 students!  Students came from a range of disciplines – planning, business, law, cultural anthropology, environmental studies, criminal justice.  Students came from three universities and included both undergraduate and graduate students.

There were two main things that made this group so special:

1. Students quickly formed a tight community that sustained the entire time.  Most students did not know one another when we met in Copenhagen on July 5th, yet they truly invested in getting to know each other such that they were still hanging out en masse on many evenings the final nights of the class.  Over the course, we spent almost all hours of every day together – meeting with local experts, through team-based ‘scavenger hunts’, during impromptu invitations to rooftop gatherings, and in very small shared rooms that rotate every so many days as we moved on to a new city.  This is an intense amount of together-time, and students took seriously their responsibility to make a community together.  (Of course there were small moments of people being hangry (hungry + angry), but even then students were able to see what was happening, deal with the root cause, and get back to laughter and joy.)  Not only did this community-building help serve students during the class in many, many ways, but it will form a solid foundation for lifelong friendships and professional relationships as students take their knowledge and experience and help make change happen back home.
2. More than other groups, this group of students quickly transitioned from the details of bicycle infrastructure to the type of society that is possible when bicycle transportation is normal, prioritized, and therefore used for 35%-55% of all trips by all people at all times. They focused on the social trust that emerges when non-verbal, constant negotiation occurs when lots of people are criss crossing each other on bike (or with pedestrians and drivers).  Students likened cycling in the cities we visited like being part of a school of fish – the group of 5-50 cyclists in any given location at any given moment – constantly making small tweaks together to allow someone to merge in or peel off.  Or, using another water analogy, how this constant flow of people on bike was like a river and when an object emerged – a tourist, friends stopping and reuniting, a truck parked halfway across a bike lane – the group simply flowed around the ‘rock’ without anger or obscenity.  Students focused on how playgrounds can be used by children and families of all kinds when many are easily accessible independently by bike and what this means for relationship building, livability, and quality of life. Students focused on how equity is radically enhanced when the barrier to mobility is not the ability to own and operate a motorized vehicle.  Through these observations, and more, this group of students really understood that designing a city so that more people can use a bike more of the time is not really about the bicycle, but about creating a more functional, livable, equitable, sustainable, happier, more joyful, city and society that also happens to offer significantly higher levels of freedom and independence than any city where motorized vehicles are the predominant mode of travel.

And the thing about this course in general is that because it is so experiential – we do everything by bike (with one train and one plane ride) – students cannot return to the US without being a changed person about what is possible in cities, why it is critical we do things differently, and what their role is in being part of the change effort.  In this regard, this fantastic group of students will now be connected to the 70 previous students who participated in previous study abroad classes, many of whom are now working professionally in this space across the country, much to the surprise of many as most students who take this class do not sign up with the thought the topic is their life passion.  Collectively, this larger group of students has a responsibility to put their knowledge into action.  It is a privilege to be able to travel and study abroad (even if paying for it) and I have no doubt that this newest group of students will take that responsibility seriously as we have critical social, economic, and environmental challenges before us and the things we learned and experienced in this class has answers for all of it.

And lest we think the responsibility falls on students alone, the four Eugene & Springfield-area professionals who also participated in this class as students (plus the four who came in 2017) have an even bigger responsibility to put knowledge into action in bigger and more urgent ways given they are in positions of relative power to do something about it.  Those with this incredible opportunity, include:

• Rob Inerfeld – Transportation Planning Manager, City of Eugene (2019)
• Sarah Mazze – Safe Routes to School Program Manager, Eugene 4J School District (2019)
• Tiffany Edwards – Director of Business Advocacy, Eugene Chamber of Commerce (2019)
• Dave Reesor –  Director, University of Oregon Transportation Services (2019)
• Reed Dunbar –  Bicycle and Pedestrian Planner, City of Eugene (2017)
• Matt Rodrigues – City Engineer, City of Eugene (2017)
• Emma Newman – Senior Transportation Planner, City of Springfield (2017)
• Laughton Elliott-Deangelis – Safe Routes to School Program Manager, Springfield School District (2017)

Many thanks to the following people we met with and learned from during this course:

• Morten Kabell – Copenhagenize
• Karolina Petz & Andreas Røhl – Gehl
• Anonymous alum who invited us to her roof for an impromptu afternoon social gathering
• Em Friedenberg – recent alum, living in Copenhagen (check out her amazing thesis work on social trust!)
• The owner of Puk Restaurant in Copenhagen – a great character and great food
• Rada Ruben – Copenhagen Staffed Playgrounds
• Jennifer Zitner – BIG
• Anonymous residents in Nordhavn, who we randomly contacted via AirBnB, who volunteered showed us where they live and gave us a walking tour of this redevelopment area
• Jesper Nordland, Christian Resebo – City of Malmö
• Ronald Tamse & Ruud Ditewig – City of Utrecht
• Marjolein de Lange – Fietsersband, Amsterdam
• Meredith Glasser – University of Amsterdam

Finally, this class was made extra special with the inclusion of Rebecca Lewis as a co-instructor.  I had not previously had a co-instructor and the basic idea of adding one this time was to have an additional person ready and able to independently lead the class in future years.  We made a great team in style and content.  I’m slightly more laid back and Rebecca is a bit more organized.  I pay a lot of attention to street design and who uses the street and Rebecca pays more attention to land use and financing/taxing mechanisms.  But, we are both applied in our orientation, focused on seeing students as agents of change, and dedicated to making learning deep, meaningful, and fun. It really was a fantastic team effort, such that it is hard to imagine running the class not as a team in the future!

And finally, finally – many many many thanks to Adam Beecham and Floris from Austin Adventures!!!! Technically, Adam and Floris were responsible for handling many of the logistics of the class – bike rentals, hotel reservations, stolen phone replacement assistance, etc. – but really, both were an integral part of this class in every way.  Both Adam and Floris engaged in all the content, brought their own local perspectives and insight into things, hung out with everyone, and provided friendship, additional (subtle) adult presence, and joy to the entire experience.

Our final class activity: me taking Co-Instructor Rebecca Lewis back to her apartment on the last night, riding in a very Dutch way!

Adam and Floris sporting their new “It Could Be Worse” hats, echoing what one may hear from a successful Dane who wishes to not make too much of a fuss about things. Somehow this became a bit of an on-going mantra during class.

With two days to go on this inspiring study abroad trip, where all of us have finally gotten to a point where we do not have to assume every driver of every vehicle is a possible threat to our safety because the cities we’ve visited have been designed for people on bicycle on every street, news from Eugene emerged of an assault on three cyclists in a residential neighborhood by a driver who simply didn’t seem to like them being there.  Two of the three people on bike peeled off due to the threat and one remained biking as not only allowed by law, but as should be possible as just a normal everyday thing.  The driver directly, physically assaulted this remaining person on bike with a deadly weapon, his car.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark and has admittedly put me into an instant funk.  Actually, an instant rage.  On the one hand, we’ve been experiencing what it is like to be on a bike in cities where 50% of all trips occur that way.  10-year old children by themselves.  3-year old children riding bikes next to their parents on big streets.  Business people going to work.  People going shopping or meeting friends at parks or cafes.  All kinds of people doing all kinds of things at all hours of the day.  And on all kinds of streets!  There is no such thing in these cities as streets for cyclists and streets not for cyclists (except highways).  Just as all streets are designed for car movement, in the places we experienced, streets are all designed for cyclists as well.  The bigger the street, the better the infrastructure for someone on bike is.  The quieter the street, the better it is designed to slow drivers down.

And what happens when cities actually re-design their streets to make this type of movement by bike possible? Rage on the road drastically declines, as does the assault and murder that goes along with automobile-dominated transport systems.  Cycling rates are huge in the cities we visited and serious injury and death are practically non-existent.  In fact, hardly anyone bikes with a helmet because safety has been designed into the entire transportation system – there are more people on bike, fewer helmets, less rage, and drastically fewer serious injuries and deaths.

So the news from Eugene is particularly angering.  Two days ago I had some hope of what could be in our community because truthfully, the opportunity to transform Eugene into one of the world’s best cities for people on bike should be straightforward. Most of our streets are over-allocated to travel lanes for cars, even using extremely conservative traffic engineering standards.  We have a vast excess of car parking spots.  Does every house with a driveway and garage also really need on-street parking, too? Why does our local government even still require landowners to provide car parking? In 2019 this is embarrassing.  Eugene has more bicycle and pedestrian bridges than bridges for cars, but those great assets barely connect to anything other than the (fantastic) river path.  Are you willing to allow your 10-year old to bike to the downtown library by herself?  Or to Kidsports?  Or to the mall for a movie?  Or to a friend’s house?  Or to the market to pick up a few things for dinner?  To school, even?  If you answered ‘no’ to any or all of these questions, then it is clear that our community is drastically failing our children and therefore all of us.  We could be doing so much more, even with the resources we have.  Have a look at what picking our kids up at school could look like:

This was the hope I had two days ago, based on the gift the cities of Copenhagen, Malmö, Utrecht, and Amsterdam have given Eugene by way of 40 years of experimentation and improvement in the quality of their streets, their cities, and their lives.

But now, I feel dread at returning to Eugene this week.  City staff have known how to design streets for safety and comfort for years, but are slow moving and have little support to put their full knowledge into practice at the pace and level they are capable of.  The City Manager, for whatever reason, refuses to put the City Council’s climate action plan, which calls for tripling of bicycle and pedestrian trips, into action.  The City Council, for whatever reason, doesn’t demand more from its City Manager or demand more from itself in creating a community where getting around by bike is considered too dangerous by most people.

And I can imagine the on-line comments regarding the vehicular assault, even though I generally don’t read them.  My guess is that they fall into a few categories:

• Blame the victim: the cyclist should have gotten out of the way once it was known an assault was likely to happen.
• Choose a different route next time (blame the victim #2): the victim should have used a different route, even if inadequate and out of the way.
• This was an isolated incident and don’t generalize to all drivers: Nope. You might not yell at anyone while driving, throw something at someone on bike, or rev your engine by a cyclist, but ask anyone you know who tries to bike in town if they’ve had any of those things happen.  You’ll probably get a 90-100% affirmative response.  My hand is raised.
• Cyclists think they own the road / They get what they deserve.  Give me a break – this is so stupid it doesn’t warrant a response.

If, for some reason, you have read this far and want to keep going – here is my official response to the vehicular assault that took place at Polk and 13th this past weekend:

Regarding the most recent ‘hit and run’ incident against a vulnerable person on bike in our community, it is unacceptable that we continue to design murder and assault into our transportation system and that the pace to do something about it remains pitifully slow. There is zero excuse for our city to not have an entirely complete system of separated bikeways on ALL streets with higher car volume / speeds, and then a massive effort to calm residential streets to 18mph max, at which point some mixing can occur.  Sharrows on streets are a sign of professional laziness and anyone installing them or suggesting that they represent safe and comfortable bike infrastructure truly are ill informed.

We also need to stop thinking that bike infrastructure should only be on Polk or Monroe (or High or Pearl or substitute any two nearby streets) and instead insist that such infrastructure be on Polk AND Monroe, Pearl AND High, etc.  And for the price of a single Beltline interchange or expansion, we could build the entire bike infrastructure for our community at a high level where hit and runs, assaults, and attempted murder by drivers are explicitly designed out of the transportation system.  This is entirely possible and the fact that it does not exist in Eugene is because our policy makers have chosen to not hold the city manager and his staff accountable for implementing the policies they’ve actually passed.

I rarely post public notes with this tone, but I am just wrapping up leading my 5^th study abroad course on redesigning cities for people on bike, so I have been exclusively on a bike for the last month in Copenhagen, Malmö, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, talking with local professionals and experiencing how life can work when the easiest transportation tool in the toolbox is a bike.  Eugene can be like one of these great cycling cities – we have the street space, we barely have any car volume, not to mention most cars are 80% vacant when in use, we have a university, we have urban growth boundaries, and more (and if you are inclined to say we are not like these European cities, don’t go there as we share way more in common than not in an effort to create a cycling city).  In addition to the 17 students (most from UO), we brought 4 Eugene professionals along this year and 4 came with the class two years ago, so there is also no longer any excuse for our staff to not know what is possible.  They need the support to think and act big – from us and from our political leaders, or else our elected officials need to be replaced (along, in my opinion, the city manager).

This is not just about bikes, of course.  It is about the care and well-being of our community, it’s about freedom and independence, the ability for our kids to get to school or the library or a park by themselves on a bike, it’s about reducing CO2, it’s about building a better economic infrastructure actually, it’s about building social trust that happens when transportation negotiations happen on the street when people can see each other instead of in isolated vehicular bubbles, it’s about equity, and a lot more.  Building cities for people on bike, with robust transit connections and of course good pedestrian realms, gets us all those nice things.  I am more convinced than ever that this is so.  And of course, it is utterly unacceptable to continue a system that has designed death and injury, via vehicular/driver assault, into our regular everyday lives.

If interested in reading through other blog posts from the study abroad that try to explain what Eugene could have, you can browse here: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/2019abroad/

While our course is focused on bicycle transportation, it is also about all the things that can happen when 35-50% of all trips by all people are done by bike.  You can read other posts to get deeper on that theme, but of course one overlay to everything is cultural.  And not cultural like “Americans love their cars” because we also love our convenience, our money, our safety, our kids’ safety, not wasting taxpayer dollars, providing opportunities for all, and so much more.  And to say the Danish, Dutch, or Swedes don’t love their cars would be be missing the truth.  It’s just that in many of their cities a car simply isn’t needed for every trip and the bike is a better tool for many transportation jobs.  And you can’t say that culturally the Danes, Dutch, or Swedes pay more in taxes, because overall they aren’t much different than what US taxpayers pay – they just allocate their money in different ways, have simplified tax structures, have fewer restrictions on how different taxes can be used (i.e. Oregon gas tax can only be used on roads – kind of hard to create other transportation options or reduce CO2 with that kind of outdated approach), and can see the results of their tax system more directly (universal health care, transportation infrastructure improvements, cost of education (e.g. Danish college students get paid to get a university education!), support in retirement, and more).  As a result, there is a bit more faith in government as a means to improve the common good.

But back to the main point of this post – Morten Kabell from Copenhagenize really got me interested in some fundamental cultural differences when he gave us typical questions parents may ask their kids when they came home from school.  He shared what the Danes, British, and (U.S.) Americans say, and after subsequently posing this question to some Dutch folks, I’ve added their response as well.

So, what do parents of different countries ask their kids about their day at school?

• U.S. – What did you learn today?
• Brits – Did you behave today?
• Danes – How did you feel today?
• Dutch – Did you have fun today?

Of course these are generalizations, but both the Danes and Dutch I spoke with could give long cultural explanations for their particular approach.  I could imagine the British asking such a question after living there a year with our kids in local schools.  And having lived in Fiji for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had a total revelation that feeling productive everyday is not a universal human desire.  I spent a year living day by day and in the moment and it was really fantastic.  But after a year, I couldn’t stand it any more and wanted to feel like I produced something; I wanted each day to include at least something that I helped make happen or that I accomplished.  And I realized that such an approach to daily life is rooted from growing up in the U.S. – not necessarily good or bad, but unique based on where I grew up.

I’m not trained to make more out of these questions than what I’ve shared and I’m not going to make grand societal comparisons and generalizations based on them.  But, I do find that a society based on making sure people’s feelings are secure and that life has joy is very appealing.  I don’t think it would hurt to try to add a bit of that into our production-oriented, winner-take-all system either.  And I happen to wholly believe that cities where people aged eight to eighty don’t need to think twice to hop on a bike to get to school or a park or a job or a doctor or a cafe are cities that increase the joy and emotional security of its people.

And here is our group, having fun, as we learn from Utrecht traffic engineer Ronald Tamse, standing in front of a globally traveling whale made of plastic scooped from the ocean to bring awareness to the damage plastic causes to our planet.  But even more joyful to me is the canal behind Ronald – until recently it was a multi-lane freeway!  Originally a canal, it was paved over to bring ‘progress’ to the city and facilitate car transport as the main mode in the city center.  That system, thankfully, eventually met resistance and eventually the highway was torn out and the canal restored.  And now, more people can move through this space on bike than ever could by car if that highway remained and was built out.

Some of us in transportation planning know that making our streets work better for people on bike is really about about creating communities that are more fun, sustainable, equitable, have more social trust, uses less land, have stronger economies, and more. Our streets are almost always the biggest source of public land in our cities, land that could be used to achieve a much greater set of positive community attributes than they currently do.  If you are someone who does not regularly reflect about all these connections that the simple street has to almost everything in our lives (that’s most people), then you likely think of the street mostly as a place that moves cars ideally as quickly as possible.

Moving something through a given place over a given time period is known as throughput.  In US transportation decision-making, throughput has become a bit of a funny thing because it is almost entirely focused on the throughput of vehicles.  When the road is congested or the traffic light red, it is really frustrating to drive, so naturally many have a desire to expand roads, turn bicycle infrastructure into car lanes (or if in Amsterdam or Utrecht, turn canals into streets) or ensure that traffic signals always prioritize vehicle movement over transit, bicycle, or pedestrian movement, all to relieve congestion and make it easier to drive.

But, why would we even want to maximize the throughput of vehicles through our streets in the first place? Certainly many businesses don’t benefit with cars zooming by at high speeds. Most of us parents don’t like our children walking or biking to school next to vehicles in such a system.  Having a drink on a street that is maximizing the throughput of vehicles is generally unpleasant as well – loud, dirty, and just a mismatch of speed vs. calm.

And the amazing fact of it all is that adding vehicle lanes to roads doesn’t even fix the problem that advocates say they will (that’s you Oregon Department of Transportation, Columbia river crossing champions, Eugene Beltline expansion advocates, and still every state Department of Transportation in the U.S. despite decades of evidence).  In fact, road expansion projects actually just make the problem worse because the congestion inevitably returns, and the opportunities to expand other forms of mobility are simultaneously reduced due both to use of land and budget.

For those in Eugene, we could spend money to have one minor improvement to a Beltline interchange or for the same amount of money, create one of the world’s most complete, integrated, safe, and comfortable cycling infrastructure – like riding on the river path, but on city streets where the places are that we like to go.  Almost all of our children could get to school independently by bike.  50% of all our trips could be done that way as well – happily and by choice because it would be easy, comfortable, fun, convenient, etc.  So we could have one Beltline interchange or extension that will be as congested and problematic in 5-10 years as it is now or we could build a system where 50% of trips are not by car, relieving some congestion on that very Beltline area while also liberating our children to be free to explore our city, including getting to school and the downtown library, which most cannot do right now.

Which gets me back to throughput.  For seventy years our streets have largely been engineered to maximize the throughput of vehicles.  But what if they were designed to maximize the throughput of people?  After all, our cars are parked 95% of their life and when they are used, they generally are only at 20% capacity.  Almost every car transports 4 empty seats almost every trip – why would we want to keep encouraging such waste and inefficiency?  Why would we want to have a community that allocates such an enormous amount of land to transport metal boxes of air and then store them as well?  (Did you know that each of our vehicles has more than 3 parking spaces waiting for them in most US cities?  One at home, one at work, and one at a place to shop – and of course, each car can’t be in all three at once.)

There is plenty more to say on this and plenty has been written elsewhere (here’s a nice article from Wired), but I thought a simple video from a single intersection in Utrecht for a single green phase of a traffic light would be better.  Imagine how crowded or how large the city streets would be if 95% of the people you see on bike in this video were a single driver of a car instead.  As a motorist, imagine how happy you would be to see so many cars not on the road. (Also – notice how quiet it is when the majority of movement is by bike!)  So go and watch the video again – wouldn’t you want your city looking like that?

After spending a week in Copenhagen (Denmark), a couple days in Malmö (Sweden), and now being in Utrecht (Netherlands), we have experienced three very different systems of street design to make cycling the most convenient and efficient way of getting around for people aged 8 to 80.  What’s clear in all three places is that people are using the bike as a tool, not as an identity or a statement.  The cities are being retrofitted so it just makes sense to use the bike.  As a 19-year old from Utrecht told me yesterday when I pointed out a cafe-lined, bicycle and pedestrian oriented plaza in town used to be a car parking lot, “that would be a terrible use of space and so loud and dirty it would be awful”.  He wasn’t anti-car, but recognized that cars and city centers are generally an inefficient mix for everyone – those moving about and those businesses (retail and offices) that want their customers or workforce to access their locations quickly and easily (and without having to wast their own private land in providing car parking spaces!) find that cycling infrastructure ends up better for all.

In any case, presentations by city officials in Malmö and Utrecht helped me frame what we’ve been seeing:

• Malmö – city of 300,000 or so, transitioning to have an integrated and complete bicycle transportation network while navigating the difficult politics of change.  Their basic design approach is to use 2-way cycle tracks on one or both sides of the street.  Ideally on both sides, but sometimes the politics dictate one side for now.  The cycle tracks are often at the same level as sidewalks, but separated from cars with a curb.  Intersections get a bit more complicated with the cycle tracks having their own intersections alongside the car intersection with movements in all directions.  It works fine for now given the volume of people on bike and car, but city officials are beginning to think about making changes in the future as bicycle trip percentage continues to go up (currently around 30% of trips).  While many busy streets had very nice 2-way, separated cycle tracks, there were also many busy car streets that had no bicycle infrastructure at all, which was a significant departure from our Copenhagen experience.
• Copenhagen – city of 600,000 or so, very balanced street design with clear parts on every busy street for cyclists and other parts for drivers.  Smaller streets are basically bike accessible in both directions even if just one-way for car – there are usually little to no pavement markings to indicate this, but low volume, slow speed roads can easily handle people on bike in both directions with everyone navigating the shared space.  50%+ of trips are by bike.  The system on busier roads is generally a grade-separated cycle track – a wide lane slightly above the car level and slightly below the pedestrian level.  Most are purposefully built for two people to bike side by side and socialize, with enough room for a family cargo bike to pass as well.  They follow the idea that the bigger the street, the better the bicycle infrastructure better be. The general street design and rules of the road would be familiar to most visitors from the US – it’s actually relatively easy to begin biking in Copenhagen and understand how it all works within 15 minutes of following someone else on bike.  (The main difference is that there are tons of people on bike all the time and everywhere, so riding with a big group takes getting used to.  And is awesome!)
• Utrecht – city of 350,000 people or so, and has transitioned to favoring the bicycle (and transit) above cars.  Many streets are not ‘balanced’ like in Copenhagen, but are dominated by people on bike in both design and behavior.  For most of the city and on most of the streets, cars are guests.  About 60% of trips are by bike.  It’s a free flowing system where stopping is avoided.  The system is like a giant river of bicycles flowing around the city in all directions, moving around any object (like a river around a rock), whether that be a car, a tourist, or basically anything.  Biking is also like being in a school of fish – as you go straight with a large number of people, it is common for people coming from the left or right to merge in everywhere all the time.  The group sees what is going on and seamlessly makes small shifts – like a school of fish! – to accommodate the newcomer.  Joining in and peeling off and being the prioritized mode of travel makes the entire system extremely free flowing and convenient. See it in action: Flowing in Utrecht

So what does that mean for cities nowhere near the stature of these three?

• First – it is possible to get there!  These cities have been working on things for 40 years, succeeding and failing and improving and making mistakes.  What a gift to other cities – we have a roadmap and there are more things in commonality than difference, so dismissing these places as “Europe is not the United States” is just a lazy thing to say (like putting sharrows on busy roads or installing signs that say “bike lane ends”).  Dear US cities – take the gift that Copenhagen, Malmö, and Utrecht have given you and get to work!
• Housing and business and equity and environment and quality of life all are interrelated when designing a system for cycling is done in a serious way.  In each of these cities, there were fights over car parking and loss of business customers and every other excuse to do nothing – universally common issues when trying to change the status quo in transportation. Those complaints tend to ring hollow once changes are made, however, so while it can be important to listen to many community voices when repurposing street space to other uses, the loud status quo voices really need to be marginalized.
• For Eugene, a simple goal should be that every 10 year old in the city ought to be able to bike to the downtown library independently, safely, and comfortably.  (If not that, how about every 10 year old within 3 miles of their school ought to be able to bike independently, safely, and comfortably to school?) A city that can’t provide that is not living up to its best self.  The experience of the cities we’ve visited shows that when you can build a cycling infrastructure that meets that simple goal, benefits to environment, equity, housing, economics, and quality of life improve across the board.  Plus, building for cycling is significantly cheaper than continuing to build for the movement and storage of vehicles, objects that are not only household’s second largest expense, but things that are parked 95% of their life and only used at 20% occupancy on average.
• There are other thoughts, like finally eliminating all minimum parking requirements for motorized vehicles (in 2019 the government still requires private landowners to provide land for car parking?  Really?) and other things, but this blog is long enough for now.

Finally some pictures: Because of extremely high volume of cyclists (see image with rainbow crossing) and a robust intercity train system, Utrecht is almost finished with a new, underground bike-only parking garage with over 14,000 spaces.  It is 2/3 done and the finished parts are open (image below).  It is possible to bike to all four (?) levels, bike racks are double-decker with hydraulic assist mechanisms, there are indicators at the rows to show if there are empty parking spots available, and more.  This garage comes on the heals of another one, just completed a hundred yards away that has 4,000 spaces.  Both garages will not be able to handle the need, but they are a major way to free up local public places that had become de facto bike parking areas (and some will continue to be).

I forgot to take many pictures in Malmö (the problem with an experiential-based class is the tendency to focus too much on experiencing the environment rather than documenting it).  So the following image comes from a most amazing evening in Malmö.  Earlier in the day, Adam Beecham of Austin Adventures, who helps out the course with logistics and other things, suggested that the class hold a progressive dinner block party in honor of my 50th birthday.  Students overwhelmingly responded immediately and enthusiastically.  So that night, we all went room to room and ate a dish prepared by the students of the room.  We were staying at the “Oh Boy Hotel”, which is a bike-oriented place (check it out) and all our rooms were at street-level and facing the street, so we could have an inside-outside vibe at each room.  It was a very fun evening and it ended up being a great way to celebrate my 50th (although my family was not with me, which would have made it even better of course).

I’m not sure who said it, but one of the first days during the trip we heard the phrase “the bigger the street, the better the infrastructure should be” (for bikes, our focus) and it has really stuck with me, because it’s so right and so obvious and almost so opposite of actual practice in most cities.  The basic point is that on the biggest and busies streets – the ones that feel potentially most unpleasant and unsafe to bike on because of the high volume and speed of cars – the infrastructure for people on bikes needs to be high quality.  And high quality on busy streets means grade separated (preferably) or barrier separated cycle tracks.  And those cycle tracks need to be wide because those are the busy streets, meaning not just busy for people on cars, but should also be busy for people on bike as they are main arteries of our transportation systems, providing access for further distances as well as to places along the easy as well.  People on bike travel at different speeds so having space to pass others is critical, as is providing space so that people can ride next to each other and talk – it can be social as well as movement! (A cycle track is like a bike lane, but has some type of physical barrier between the space for bikes and the movement of cars.  When on a proper cycle track, it feels like riding a bike on a river path through the park in terms of comfort, but is in the urbanized area where our schools, shops, jobs and friends actually are.)

So, what does a typical American city do with its big streets (big generalization, but it fits)?  Streets got big to move more cars, meaning both higher speeds and many lanes for car traffic.  Traffic engineers generally don’t like cars to be near humans walking/biking so rarely is there any bicycle infrastructure at all (or humane sized sidewalks).  In Eugene, think Franklin, 6th and 7th, or West 11th.  In some cities, a simple bike lane (line of paint) may be on such streets as a sign of how progressive a bike city it is; in Eugene, think 11th, River Road, Coburg Road, or Pearl. So, generally the message is – big streets are for cars, and people on bike can use the little streets next to them and those other streets may have some tweaks to make them a bit more bike friendly, but rarely not. The real response, though, should be that bicycle infrastructure should exist on those quieter streets AND the big, streets as well.  After all, cars have ubiquitous access to all streets, so why don’t people on bike?

Would you send your 10 year old on any of those streets on bike?  Probably not, meaning your 10 year old will never make it to the Eugene library or Saturday market or Eugene Toy & Hobby or maybe the skate park or basically to any middle or high school and likely not to most elementary schools.  How sad.  Or forget your 10 year old – what about you? I know that for most of my friends, any of these streets exceed their stress threshold, so it is completely rational not to think of getting on a bike to do normal life things, despite that most people’s destinations are within a 2 mile journey from home, certainly 3 miles, and almost guaranteed 4 miles and all involve these streets.

How very sad, for all of us, that such freedom and independence has been designed out of our lives.  Which brings us to Denmark, or at least Copenhagen and the journey north to the city of Helsingor, 25 miles away. Are there big streets in Copenhagen that compare to big American sized streets?  Is it possible to have completely separated cycle tracks on such streets if they exist? Obviously the answer is yes and yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post! Have a look at these pictures – not very ‘old Europe’ looking are they?  And they all – ALL!!! – are grade separated and often have other separation (parked cars, for example)  – because the bigger the street, the better the infrastructure should be.  The cycle tracks are generally 12′-16′ wide – enough to easily ride socially talking to a friend and often wide enough for a third person on bike to pass a talking pair.  (Note that the images have few vehicles because it’s summer and many people have left the city for vacation, but the streets are otherwise busy with cars and busy with people on bike.)

Our first week of class, all in Copenhagen, has come to an end, so let’s recap:

• Day 1 (Friday): met at 3:30pm, sent students stalking people on bike at 5pm to learn how cycling works here, had a pizza party in a park for dinner after getting very lost and very found
• Day 2 (Saturday): evening city bike tour with Bike Mike – history, culture, Danish dry humor, and tons of the city
• Day 3 (Sunday): Student scavenger hunt, exploring all parts of the city while responding to silly prompts; watched Women’s world cup in a packed pub (USA wins!)
• Day 4 (Monday): meet with Copenhagenize CEO for lecture and bike tour
• Day 5 (Tuesday): meet with two people from Gehl for lecture and walking tour; traditional Danish  dinner at Puk
• Day 6: (Wednesday): meet in a park and listen to our accompanying professionals on what they are thinking; meet recent UO alum living in Copenhagen for some peer to peer questioning; beautiful bike ride along the Green Route to Palace and grounds
• Day 7 (Thursday): meet at the Traffic Garden (perhaps the cutest spot on the planet) to hear about staffed playgrounds in Copenhagen then students find at least five playgrounds in the city to explore
• Day 8 (Friday): meet at the offices of BIG, one of the premier architecture (and more) design firms in the world, for overview of work

And in between all of these bulleted items were individual trips to museums,  cafes, neighborhoods, and much more.  Almost all of it by bike with an occasional walking or transit trip for some.  Not a single motorized vehicle used in over a week and we’ve probably been traveling more than the average US household does daily in a car.

And equally great to what we have learned, seen, and experienced, is that the group of students (and professionals) have formed a close community already! We are all doing this journey together and it all feels better because of it.

Jazz parade in Copenhagen. Picture by Sarah Mazze.

I’m currently participating in my 6th study abroad and have recently been sharing with others how I approach things and have been getting astonished responses (in a good way), so I thought I’d share some of what we do and why.  My first study abroad I was just a visiting faculty member, embedded into someone else’s program and it taught me a lot about how to structure the course I created and am now leading for my fifth time (and co-leading this year for the first time).  In that original class, students did have a field component to their work, but most of the instruction was classroom-based with clear delineations of school time and non-school time.  Students partied a lot and for whatever reason, I associate the two.

So when I created my “Redesigning Cites for People on Bike” class in 2011 and expanded it in 2012, I wanted to do things very differently.  I didn’t want students in a classroom.  I didn’t want the delineation between school hours and non-school hours to be so defined.  I wanted to treat students like adults.  And I wanted students to experience being in a place, not just visiting it, as much as possible.  I’ve been around other study abroad instructors or others who work with study abroad groups to help with logistics and local tours and such, and it seems that some of the things we do in this class are quite outside the norm.  So I thought I’d share a bit of that.

The basic purpose of the class is for students to experience what it is like to be in cities where getting around by bike is normal, and then to understand all the ways society improves as a result.  The focus really isn’t on bicycle transportation, but on city design that works better for more people in all aspects of their lives.  Over the course of a month we typically spend about 7 days in Copenhagen, 5 in Utrecht, 7 in Amsterdam, and then take a 5-day journey from city to city by bike with a stop in Malmö to experience inter-city travel by bike as well.  So, with an objective of having students experience a completely different city transportation structure, we are on bike everyday just doing normal things.  There’s more to say, but here are some of the tangible things we do in this class that seem to be outside the norm:

• On Day 1 we meet around 3:30 in the afternoon, have a quick orientation, set expectations, and then figure out how to bike in Copenhagen. The orientation is basically: “1) everyone who has self-selected into a class like this is an amazing human being so over this month take advantage of getting to know everyone, otherwise what a waste.  Pair up with different people during the course, especially those who you find may be rubbing you the wrong way so that you can get beyond those initial stereotypes; 2) you will be treated like adults because that’s what you are; 3) drinking is fine and a normal part of things, but if we have to bail you out of jail or pick you up from the hospital because of excessive drinking, we will send you home; and 4) as cheesy as it sounds, you are ambassadors of the US and others will stereotype our whole country based on your behavior, so represent well and build positive connections.”
• Then comes the real fun part – we get bikes and we tell students to either individually or with only one other person to go pick someone on bike and follow them for 20 minutes (without being creepy of course) and do what they do as a way to understand how the system works.  Then, wherever students are after 20 minutes or when they start feeling comfortable, they have to use a paper map (no digital maps at first!) complemented by asking people if necessary, to figure out where they are and then how to get to a meeting spot for a first night group dinner in a park where there is food and a first chance to debrief.
• Again – only paper maps at first!  We want students to get lost, to pay attention to their surroundings, and to figure out how to get found.  We want students to experience that no matter what street they end up on, they 100% belong there on bike.  On almost every street, quiet or busy.  This is extremely hard to contemplate without experiencing it and getting lost helps.  Following a blue line on a digital map or audio instructions on when and where to turn does nothing for actually understanding that any street is as good as any other street in terms of safety and comfort on bike.  Not unexpectedly, this whole paper map thing sounds totally bizarre to students and universally they come to see the wisdom really quickly.
• Our days are never the same and may have some combination of: 1) meeting and maybe biking/walking tour with local professional; 2) an exercise like a scavenger hunt designed to go further and wider on bike than students may otherwise go, plus to build relationships among the group; 3) a debrief; and 4) some open time for students to explore the city on their own based on their interests.  The academic part is not necessarily confined between 9am-5pm; we might have days from 9am-10pm where are all together and other days where we have a morning professional meeting and a dinner debrief in the park.
• The Scavenger Hunt – again, the core part of the course is really for students to experience what it is like to be in cities where everything that needs to be done in life can be done via bike, including observing and engaging with families or seniors doing the same thing.  The Scavenger Hunt is designed to get students out and about, get lost, discover interesting things, and have fun.  We pick seven or so categories of things we want students to get photographic evidence of for which there is a competition for best pictures and prizes delivered (it’s not a race!).  Categories are things like: go to a supermarket and take a picture of a product you’ve never seen before at home, take a picture (and realistically, buy and eat) the best looking pastry, pick a country for your team and take a picture in front of that embassy, take a picture of a cool bike with the owners of that bike, etc.  Students pair up (biking in a group is no way to learn anything and as a pair for this fun exercise, a good relationship develops as the exercise could take 2-7 hours depending on how much fun everyone is having).  It’s a blast to see what students come up with, and of course along the way they have spoken with local residents, tried new foods, and found themselves in many parts of the city they might not have wandered into otherwise, again reinforcing just how ubiquitous, comfortable, and easy it is to move by bike in the cities we visit.
• We generally don’t ride in groups together – most days we meet someone somewhere or we meet as a group at a different place than we’ve met before like a park or plaza or canal.  Usually the night before we give the details for the following day (students have the basic itinerary / syllabus) as we are constantly making tweaks and scoping places out.  We discourage traveling to these places in groups, although realistically in the cities we visit, biking is always in a group because others are always out going this way and that.  But we do’t want our students biking in groups with other students because we want each student to be an individual navigator of the urban environment and when you bike with a larger group, only the person in front is really paying attention.  Biking with one other person is fine as so much biking in these cities also happens to be social biking – it is possible to bike next to a friend and still have others pass you because the cycle tracks are generally wide enough (on purpose!) to do that.  Otherwise, we tell students, “tomorrow, meet at 10am, at X address, and ride by yourself or one other person.  See you then. And allocate extra time in case you make some wrong turns.”  Of course, not all students arrive at the same time, but they all arrive.  And when of the local experts we meet with takes us no a bike tour around the city, we do ride as one large group (which inevitably splits into three smaller groups) and this contrast of biking experience also proves insightful for students.  Some students actually love being with our own group as a mass as it feels like an invincible blob traveling about.  Others hate it because it is too conforming and slow and a bit oblivious.  So much to experience, reflect on, and learn!
• Many study abroad programs to Europe are treated by students as excuses to visit different cities every weekend and party, but not this one. In this class, students do not have time to visit other places because we have some type of something 6-7 days a week, but because the class is immersive, fun and varied, there is no FOMO (fear of missing out) of not being able to visit other places in Europe during the course. Students are free to travel before or after the course as travel to/from Europe is on their own.
• We ask students to remain open and flexible so that we can take advantage of things that pop up like getting invited to a rooftop social by a local person or gathering at a brewpub when the US women’s soccer team is in the final or when the weather turns sour and we decide to mix up the order of things.
• We identify placeholder times for lectures, but reserve the right not to deliver them if unnecessary.  As we meet with local professionals and debrief as a group at various times, we assess if there are concepts and theories and information that students need to make sense of everything else they are experiencing and hearing.  Sometimes that means we need to take a couple of hours for a lecture-type session and sometimes such lectures are not necessary at all.
• We schedule a nice dinner early on as well.  Most lunches and dinners students are on their own and while students have varying budgets, few have the opportunity to go to a nice dinner.  With the generous support of the Scan Design Foundation, we have the opportunity to go out as a group to have a traditional Danish meal at a nice restaurant with a good vibe (we’ve been going to Puk and everything about it is incredible).  Students dress up, sit with someone new, and are as social as you would expect a group of 20 people going out for a 3-hour meal to be.  Yes, this is a nice ‘free’ meal, but it is much more – it is tone setting, community building, and it is fun.
• And there are assignments of course, but none that take students out of the flow from the purpose of this course.  The core assignment is to blog nearly daily, sharing their observations, thought processes, questions, and whatever else they are seeing, feeling, or thinking about.  This format gives students an opportunity to take a pause and wrestle and make sense of everything they are experiencing.  There is experience overload for sure and it is easy for students to just keep going and going and going because there is so much to experience in the cities we visit.  The blogging is a ‘forced’ moment to reflect and process.  It is also a record of the evolution of their thinking along the way and a way for their friends and family back home to follow along, an important piece of connection for most students.  The other main assignment is some type of final deliverable that reflects some of the main things students learned or focused on during the course.  The exact format of that project, however, is not pre-determined; instead, the students themselves come up with some meta-deliverable they would like to collectively create and share with people back home who have not had the experience students have.  This could be a podcast series, a coffee table book, a traveling photo exhibit, etc.  Each year’s students settle on something different.  And then within that larger deliverable, students are empowered to focus on the piece that most resonates with them, thereby allowing students to customize their studies while also contributing to this larger whole.
• In the end, perhaps the main overarching approach we take is to treat students like adults.  During my almost 20 years teaching at the university level, I’ve come to learn that students are almost never treated like adults.  They are rarely told they have value, good ideas, capacity to make a difference, or are responsible for their own learning and for helping create the community they are part of.  Thus, in some ways we have it easy – we tell students we will treat them like adults and then we structure our class to reinforce that we mean it.  And in return, students respond as we would hope.  And more.  Students then take responsibility for one another, helping someone who may be struggling, or recognizing the need to have quieter voices a space to speak up.  They bring things to an impromptu rooftop gathering even when told there is no need to bring anything, and then help clean up without prompting (just as all their parents had hoped they would!).  They keep each other in check if anything is on the verge of getting out of hand.  but more than that, they take things seriously, engage seriously, build relationships seriously, and grow as people in a short amount of time.  And in their free time, they actually go and see the city – museums, festivals, plazas, cafes, etc. – the types of things we would all hope our adult, college-aged children would do while in another country.  It’s magical.
• Of course, not all is perfect. I can’t tell you what the complaints have been over the years, although I’m sure there have been some suggestions for improvement next time, because much of the course has been co-created with students.  Of course, there is a ton of work that goes into a class like this where we are meeting with a different local professional almost every day for a month across multiple cities we have as a base.  That work isn’t easy, but the structure of the course around those more fixed time engagements allows for students to combine their own interests with our course objectives in their own customized ways.  For many students, this class is transformational.  Few start the class thinking their future professional and personal passion will be to redesign cities so that more people can use a bike more often, but many end the class exactly interested in that and subsequently find professional jobs that allow them to put into practice all they saw and learned while abroad. Every cohort of students gets connected with previous cohorts, meaning that there will be almost 100 students this year that have been part of this one course (and 8 professionals who have also been invited to be part of things), creating a national network of similarly trained people, many of whom are now practicing professionals in the field.
• Work with someone who helps with logistics (we work with Adam Beecham from Austin Adventures). Part of what makes this class work as well is having a third party who helps with logistics like hostel rentals, helping find a great spot for a group dinner, figuring out how to transport bags on our city-to-city riding portion, lending a hand to figure out how to replace a stolen phone, and more.  For our last three courses, we have worked with Adam Beecham of Austin Adventures, someone who both genuinely enjoys the course content and calmly handles so many logistical details.  We work in partnership from trip planning to the course itself.  Having someone who pays attention to some of the logistical details and is an additional resource t gauge the pulse of the group is invaluable, especially if you are someone like me for whom such logistical details can be a major source of stress.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things and hopefully I haven’t oversold what we do.  To many, the class can seem strange – “you just bike around every day and talk about it?” – but, there is a lot of intention that goes into everything we do because we not only want students to learn the material, we want them to make a positive difference in the world professionally, and be good people individually.  A one month study abroad course can’t completely deliver on all of that, of course, but this one seems to get pretty darn close.  And did I say it is fun as well?  Being in the places we visit, but more importantly, seeing the wonder and the growth of students, is pure joy.

2019 Study Abroad class – in Copenhagen

Yesterday we visited the headquarters for Gehl, a highly respected and influential international consulting and design firm focused on helping cities be better designed for people.  The concept seems intuitive, but for 70 years, most cities in most “developed” countries have been designed for cars – how to move them and how to store them.  This takes a tremendous amount of land, costs so much it can’t be paid for, socially divides communities, undermines economic vitality, and makes it so that most of us won’t let our 10 year olds bike or walk to school.  Gehl has reminded cities around the world that they should be built for people first.

We had a great talk and Q&A session with Karolina Petz at Gehl headquarters (which is a cool place to be as well) and then we went out for a walking tour for a few hours with Andreas Røhl.  Both provided different kinds of insight.  For Karolina’s talk, we heard the basic framing of Gehl’s approach – start with people and what they want, then identify and design the public realm for them (plazas, parks, streets, etc.), and once that skeleton is in place, think about the buildings that help frame the public space.  With this approach, public life can be maximized.  They have a very sophisticated method for observing and documenting how people use various spaces and one of our students was actually a student data collector for a Gehl project that happened on the University of Oregon campus this past year, a cool connection.

Andreas Røhl from Gehl sharing his insights with students.

Following this amazing morning, we had a whole group dinner at Puk, a 500 year old bar and subsequent restaurant as well.  The room we gathered in was about half below ground level, but when the building originally was built it was at ground level.  Over the years, the outside ground got higher due to layers of trash, pavement, trash, pavement, etc.  The evening was very very nice – students dressed up, we had a traditional Danish meal, had amazing insightful and funny commentary and information from the owner the whole evening, and students just had a lot of fun conversations.  Our professional participants were there as well, so there was additional community building and connections happening with them as well.

One thing that we try to do in this class is to treat students like the adults they are, which is rarely how they are treated at the university, sometimes by their parents, and often by society as a whole.  But if we treat them as adults, I’ve found they respond in kind by generally acting like adults, taking responsibility for their own and their community’s actions.  And once that reciprocity is established, almost everything is better – the learning, the relationship building, the fun, the flexibility, and more.  So far, this group of students seems to appreciate and respond well to this approach, although i think it has caught a few off guard (in a good way!).

Finally – apologies for not so many pictures of actual infrastructure. This is my sixth time to Copenhagen and almost every picture looks like every other picture – masses of normal looking people (although often nicely dressed as it is Denmark) moving every which way on bike.  It is really hard to convey in an image just how ubiquitous and normal bicycle travel is. So, rather than taking more pictures that look like all my old pictures, I’m spending my time on a bike just being present in the moment.

Part of the class is for students to blog as well, taking the time to reflect upon what they’ve seen, experienced, and heard and try to figure out what it all means, what questions arise, and how to put knowledge into action upon return.  Two of our participating professionals are blogging as well. It is very insightful to read through the progression of thinking. Here are links to all of them (site designs vary):